Official figures show that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit in Britain rose unexpectedly in January and by the largest amount since last July.
The Office for National Statistics said the number of people claiming jobless benefit rose by 23,500 to 1.64 million in January, the worst figure since April 1997. That followed two months of falls and confounded expectations for another decline of 10,000.
The number of people without a job on the wider ILO measure fell by 3,000 in the three months to December to just under 2.46 million, leaving the jobless rate at 7.8%.
Average weekly earnings growth remained subdued, rising by 0.8% in the three months to December compared with a year earlier. Excluding bonuses, average weekly earnings rose by 1.2% for a third month running, the lowest since this series began in 2001.
Bank's QE decision 'finely balanced'
Meanwhile, all nine members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee voted this month not to expand the bank's quantitative easing policy this month.
Minutes of the MPC's February 3-4 meeting also showed a unanimous vote in favour of leaving interest rates at 0.5%, though the decision on whether to increase the £200 billion QE programme was 'very finely balanced' for some MPC members.
Economists had expected that at least one MPC member would have voted for more QE given that the BoE's economic forecasts published last week show inflation undershooting its 2% target over the medium term.
But the minutes show that while MPC members were concerned that inflation may be below target for much of the next three years, they were not sure how much they can fine-tune monetary policy and were still debating how past asset purchases would work through into the economy.
The BoE slashed rates to 0.5% and started its programme of asset purchases with newly created money in March 2009, when the economy was at the depths of its worst recession in more than 50 years.
